It is the title of the book that catches the attention: Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye . And where does this happen? Author Marie Mutsuki Mockett tells us, “Mount Doom is considered one of Japan’s most sacred places…it’s in the very, very far north of Japan and it is an extinguished volcano. You’re met with a really, really strong smell of sulphur, but it kind of signals that you’re in another world. You know, you’re smelling the inside of the earth. And there are these little pools of bubbling sulphuric hot water that come up in these strange rock formations. There aren’t a lot of birds flying around. There’s very little vegetation. So it’s a very desolate, barren, dead landscape, but it’s also eerily beautiful. And there’s a river, Sanzu-no-Kawa, which runs from the lake down the mountain and out into the ocean, and this is considered sort of like the River Styx. And there are many stories about the souls of the dead seen walking along this river as they come to the top of Mount Doom and then pause –– hence the title of my book ‘When The Dead Pause…’ –– before they slip into the underworld. And so Mount Doom has become this place of pilgrimage where people who are mourning if they needed desperately to just go to that final spot where they could perhaps catch the person who they miss who has died and say goodbye one more time.”
Mockett lost her father, an American and was seeped in grief. In her search for solace she came to her mother’s traditions, the Japanese way. “Of course grief is special and private and everyone’s grief is unique, and the person that we have lost is unique. But there are all of these wonderful traditions which take individual pain like that and cast it against the backdrop of human suffering, just in general. So for example, I write about something called toro nagashi, which is lantern floating, where during Obon –– which is this period in August when the spirits of the ancestors come home –– one can go to any number of locations, purchase a paper lantern and write down the names of the people who you have lost, then go to either a river or in my case, it was the ocean, and put the lantern in the water just as the sun is setting. So when you put your lantern out it’s still sort of light. And then very quickly, it becomes dark. And then very quickly you’re aware of the fact that there are hundreds of lanterns on the water and that hundreds of people are mourning their loved ones, and that your loss is one of many, many losses. When I was really intensely depressed and disoriented, I would sit there and think, I just want this pain to shrink, I want it to get smaller. And what I learned was it wasn’t really possible for me to miss my father less, but, kind of the world, the backdrop against which I missed him could be larger, which had the effect of making that pain feel less. And the only way to do that was to sort of open my heart up more and have more compassion for other people who had suffered similar losses.”
Mockett says, “I think the Japanese believe that we are connected to our ancestors…I’m not one of these people who can believe in a spirit plane or believes that I can actually conjure his spirit or anything truly –– truly metaphysical. Metaphorically, I can accept. And that is something I definitely learned from Japan and feel comfortable with.”
Mockett says she discovered the essentials of her father in her when a priest who called himself Darth Vader he told her, “… sometimes you just need to do something and learn the lesson later –– which is perhaps a healthier way to live because, of course you can’t always know why you're doing what you're doing. Sometimes you simply have to go through an experience…”
